Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Spring officially began yesterday, but in New York City, trees don't often blossom before early April. This year it's different, as this view looking across Park Avenue towards the Colgate-Palmolive building shows.

This was the New York Post's take on the settlement, which limits the liability of Mets owner Fred Wilpon to the trustee in charge of winding up the affairs of, and paying claims against, the bankrupt investment enterprise of convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Many fans were rooting for Wilpon to lose, on the theory that it would force him to sell the team to a more deep-pocketed, and perhaps more competent, owner. Harvey Araton, in the Times, has a perhaps predictably less hysterical view of the situation.

While I've sometimes fantasized about going to a Mets game and, with a little help from my friends, unfurling a banner over the upper deck railing emblazoned with "Why can't we fire the Wilpons?", contemplating a change of ownership has, for me, always posed the devil-you-know versus the devil-you-don't quandary. My modest hope at present is that the Wilpons, Père et Fils, will let Sandy Alderson and Terry Collins manage with the resources they have. I'm glad to stick with the team (indeed, David Brooks suggests I might lack character if I didn't) through a period of re-building, if it's done right.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

On my almost daily walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park and back yesterday, I saw a car of a kind I hadn't seen in years: a Sunbeam Alpine. An Alpine, in light blue, was my second car. I had it from 1965, during my first year of university, until 1971 when, in what retrospectively seems an act of insanity, I traded it in for a Chevy Vega.

Sunbeam was a marque of the English Rootes Group, which also made cars under the Hillman, Humber, and Talbot names. The Alpine shared its chassis with the Hillman Husky, a small station wagon or, in British parlance, an estate. This made it quite sturdy but, by sports car enthusiast standards, the chassis was a bit hefty for the Alpine's four cylinder engine. I found mine peppy enough.

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About Me

I narrowly missed being that rara avis for my generation, a native Floridian, when the U.S. Army closed its hospital in Tallahassee, shortly before my mother’s due date. She went home, and I was born in a city renowned in Vaudeville humor: Altoona, Pennsylvania. In that chilly March of 1946, the first sound to reach my infant ears from outside the hospital walls was likely the shriek of a steam locomotive’s whistle. This could explain my lifelong love of trains. Four surface crossings of the Atlantic in childhood also led to fascination with ships and the sea.

My father was in the military, so our family (I was an only child) went from place to place often in my early years. I was in England from the ages of five to eight (the first newspaper headline I recall reading is “KING DIES”; the King in question being George VI, father of Elizabeth II) and began my formal education in a rural county council (what we call “public”) school, where I probably escaped having my bottom caned only because the headmistress feared creating an international incident. Other places where I lived while growing up were Miami, San Antonio, Cheyenne, the Florida panhandle and Tampa.

I graduated from the University of South Florida (B.A., 1967) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1970). After that, apart from two years' duty in the U.S. Army, I practiced law in New York City. I worked in law firms and as in-house counsel, and served on the boards of directors of an insurer and a reinsurer. On a volunteer basis I now write for Brooklyn Heights Blog and the Brooklyn Bugle, and also publish my own blog, Self-Absorbed Boomer, which has been described as "relentlessly eclectic." In 1991, I married Martha Foley, an historian and archivist. We live in Brooklyn Heights. Our daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia Scales, also lives in Brooklyn.